How Ethical is Doing Negative SEO on Competitors Site?

When you can’t be able to come up on search results, why not apply negative SEO tactics on your competitors? How ethical it is to do so? Read on this blog post of mine on how ethical is doing negative SEO on competitor’s site?

Let me first tell you all about what is negative SEO? There was a time when we use to hear this term black hat SEO, and it was a process of doing unethical means to rank high on search engines. People use to do things like keywords stuffing, doorway pages, etc. to influence the ranking of their website.

Needless to say that we hear those things, we were aware of those techniques, but never implemented on any site, despite being forced by many clients. Honestly I even lost a good SEO contract just because I did not prefer to do unethical things, and they handed over the project to my own competitor who was willing to do so, and unfortunately their website died unnatural death very soon.

Negative SEO

With the intervention of Google updates like Penguin and Panda, (especially after Penguin update, since it was based upon the back links of a website) we SEO’s came through this new term Negative SEO. Honestly not many SEO’s are there who ever preferred to do so for their clients, but then there are usually some clients who came up with this idea.

They know the fact that it becomes hard to reach to the top rankings on Google, and then why not apply negative SEO on their competitors so that they might get down from the top rankings?

If you read this blog post of mine you will realize that it is a process in which you can build poor quality links for a website usually your competitor’s website since building links from those poor quality websites was quite easy, and hence Google might think that they themselves are doing this, thus causing a Google Penalty (also read the 20 Reasons Which Might Penalize Your Website by Google!) on them and thus their website might rank low in Google.

How I came to know this Negative SEO Concept?

To be very frank, one of my client who was facing this Unnatural Links Penalty, asked me to apply the same tricks for their competitors, which I eventually rejected then and there only.

This was the reason why I came up with that blog post on negative SEO and how to get rid of the same.

How ethical is doing Negative SEO on Competitors Site?

Coming back to our original discussion, I raised this issue once again just because I was getting a few offers from a few of my clients to do apply the same on their competitors and it is actually worrying me a lot.

Obviously applying any negative things is not at all ethical and I would never go ahead with it, but then what about others. Our competitors might be applying those on for our own website. In that case we are sure to face the consequences, and we might have to face the penalty as well.

To be very frank, I usually have this much of faith on Google that they might be able to track these things as well, but I am not 100% sure about it. I am not even sure about it that whether they do have any technique which can tell them which links of a website are being created by themselves or from someone not at all related with that website? And I am not at all sure if they can have any technique which can guide them to understand the purpose of the creation of a link?

How to Deal with Negative SEO?

If ever applied on your website, how will you go to handle the negative SEO stuff?

As per me it is not that much difficult as well. Let me guide you in this blog as well:

Keep an Eye on Google Webmaster Tools

The very first thing which you need to do is to keep an eye on Google webmasters tool, and keep track of your back links. The thing which can worst damage the reputation of your website these days is poor quality content on your site and poor quality links from others website.

Content on your website can easily be managed by you, but what about links? You can easily keep an eye on those links through Google Webmaster Tools. If you ever found any suspicious links simply go ahead to disavow it.

How to Disavow a Link?

Disavowing a link is quite easy; you can get all the information about disavowing a link on this blog post of mine.

Do let me know if you had any issue with it. You can comment over here or on that blog post as well, if you have any doubt about Disavow Links Tool.

Being a SEO with ethics I might reject people to apply these things, but you can’t be sure about others. What do you think about it? Do you think that people can even accept such offers (which many of SEO’s are obviously doing) for the sake of money? Do you know any other mean through which we can keep an eye on such things?

If yes then please do share the same with us in the form of comments. I will wait for your feedback about it.

About Author

Alok Vats, the owner of Tech Acid, brings over nine years of search engine optimization experience to this blog, and is considered a leading expert in his field of internet marketing. Prior to founding the blogs like Tech Acid, I News India, Make Your Health, etc. Alok was the Online Marketing Manager, and SEO Manager, at different organizations like Koenig Solutions, Visnova Solutions, Abhinav Outsourcings, Accuracast London, etc.
The online marketing strategies of Alok Vats have increased the sales for a client by around 300% within a time span of 6 months only. His experience of online marketing field can be helpful to people who are looking for attracting more business and to increase sales through their websites, and to increase business and brand name through their blog.

This is a nice one Alok. Although we might not do it on our own, it is pretty hard to identify the bad back links from our site. This is really a very helpful one cos I would have never thought in this direction otherwise.

Thanks Vinay, I am glad that you liked it. Honestly it is we only who can decide about the bad links. We can easily understand which links are there which we created and which are there which we did not. And hence we can judge the quality of them and restrict Google to maintain those bad links…